How Governments Detect VPN Traffic, and Why Encryption Alone Doesn't Hide It

A VPN that works perfectly at home can stop working the moment its user lands in a country with a national firewall. The encryption hasn’t changed. Nobody has broken AES or cracked a WireGuard key. The tunnel is just as secure as it was the day before, and it still gets blocked within minutes.

That’s because a VPN hides what you send, not that you’re using a VPN. Censors don’t need to read your traffic to stop it. They read everything around it: the handshake that opens the connection, the size and timing of packets, the reputation of the server’s IP address, and how that server responds when someone else knocks on its door. Detecting VPN traffic is a contest over signals, not encryption strength, and the people building national firewalls have become very good at reading those signals.

The detection stack, from cheap to expensive

Network operators don’t rely...

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